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Seeing and Being Seen: The Q'eqchi' Maya of Livingston, Guatemala, and Beyond
By Hilary E. Kahn. 2006
The practice of morality and the formation of identity among an indigenous Latin American culture are framed in a pioneering…
ethnography of sight that attempts to reverse the trend of anthropological fieldwork and theory overshadowing one another.In this vital and richly detailed work, methodology and theory are treated as complementary partners as the author explores the dynamic Mayan customs of the Q'eqchi' people living in the cultural crossroads of Livingston, Guatemala. Here, Q'eqchi', Ladino, and Garifuna (Caribbean-coast Afro-Indians) societies interact among themselves and with others ranging from government officials to capitalists to contemporary tourists.The Karankawa Indians of Texas: An Ecological Study of Cultural Tradition and Change
By Robert A. Ricklis. 1996
Popular lore has long depicted the Karankawa Indians as primitive scavengers (perhaps even cannibals) who eked out a meager subsistence…
from fishing, hunting and gathering on the Texas coastal plains. That caricature, according to Robert Ricklis, hides the reality of a people who were well-adapted to their environment, skillful in using its resources, and successful in maintaining their culture until the arrival of Anglo-American settlers. The Karankawa Indians of Texas is the first modern, well-researched history of the Karankawa from prehistoric times until their extinction in the nineteenth century. Blending archaeological and ethnohistorical data into a lively narrative history, Ricklis reveals the basic lifeway of the Karankawa, a seasonal pattern that took them from large coastal fishing camps in winter to small, dispersed hunting and gathering parties in summer. In a most important finding, he shows how, after initial hostilities, the Karankawa incorporated the Spanish missions into their subsistence pattern during the colonial period and coexisted peacefully with Euroamericans until the arrival of Anglo settlers in the 1820s and 1830s. These findings will be of wide interest to everyone studying the interactions of Native American and European peoples.Of Summits and Sacrifice
By Thomas Besom. 2009
In perhaps as few as one hundred years, the Inka Empire became the largest state ever formed by a native…
people anywhere in the Americas, dominating the western coast of South America by the early sixteenth century. Because the Inkas had no system of writing, it was left to Spanish and semi-indigenous authors to record the details of the religious rituals that the Inkas believed were vital for consolidating their conquests. Synthesizing these arresting accounts that span three centuries, Thomas Besom presents a wealth of descriptive data on the Inka practices of human sacrifice and mountain worship, supplemented by archaeological evidence. Of Summits and Sacrifice offers insight into the symbolic connections between landscape and life that underlay Inka religious beliefs. In vivid prose, Besom links significant details, ranging from the reasons for cyclical sacrificial rites to the varieties of mountain deities, producing a uniquely powerful cultural history.The Worlds of the Moche on the North Coast of Peru
By Elizabeth P. Benson. 2012
The Moche, or Mochica, created an extraordinary civilization on the north coast of Peru for most of the first millennium…
AD. Although they had no written language with which to record their history and beliefs, the Moche built enormous ceremonial edifices and embellished them with mural paintings depicting supernatural figures and rituals. Highly skilled Moche artisans crafted remarkable ceramic vessels, which they painted with figures and scenes or modeled like sculpture, and mastered metallurgy in gold, silver, and copper to make impressive symbolic ornaments. They also wove textiles that were complex in execution and design. A senior scholar renowned for her discoveries about the Moche, Elizabeth P. Benson published the first English-language monograph on the subject in 1972. Now in this volume, she draws on decades of knowledge, as well as the findings of other researchers, to offer a grand overview of all that is currently known about the Moche. Touching on all significant aspects of Moche culture, she covers such topics as their worldview and ritual life, ceremonial architecture and murals, art and craft, supernatural beings, government and warfare, and burial and the afterlife. She demonstrates that the Moche expressed, with symbolic language in metal and clay, what cultures in other parts of the world presented in writing. Indeed, Benson asserts that the accomplishments of the Moche are comparable to those of their Mesoamerica contemporaries, the Maya, which makes them one of the most advanced civilizations of pre-Columbian America.The First New Chronicle and Good Government: On the History of the World and the Incas up to 1615
By Roland Hamilton. 2009
One of the most fascinating books on pre-Columbian and early colonial Peru was written by a Peruvian Indian named Felipe…
Guaman Poma de Ayala. This book, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, covers pre-Inca times, various aspects of Inca culture, the Spanish conquest, and colonial times up to around 1615 when the manuscript was finished. Now housed in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark, and viewable online at www. kb. dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage. htm, the original manuscript has 1,189 pages accompanied by 398 full-page drawings that constitute the most accurate graphic depiction of Inca and colonial Peruvian material culture ever done. Working from the original manuscript and consulting with fellow Quechua- and Spanish-language experts, Roland Hamilton here provides the most complete and authoritative English translation of approximately the first third of The First New Chronicle and Good Government. The sections included in this volume (pages 1-369 of the manuscript) cover the history of Peru from the earliest times and the lives of each of the Inca rulers and their wives, as well as a wealth of information about ordinances, age grades, the calendar, idols, sorcerers, burials, punishments, jails, songs, palaces, roads, storage houses, and government officials. One hundred forty-six of Guaman Poma's detailed illustrations amplify the text.The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799
By Maria F. Wade. 2003
The region that now encompasses Central Texas and northern Coahuila, Mexico, was once inhabited by numerous Native hunter-gather groups whose…
identities and lifeways we are only now learning through archaeological discoveries and painstaking research into Spanish and French colonial records. From these key sources, Maria F. Wade has compiled this first comprehensive ethnohistory of the Native groups that inhabited the Texas Edwards Plateau and surrounding areas during most of the Spanish colonial era.Much of the book deals with events that took place late in the seventeenth century, when Native groups and Europeans began to have their first sustained contact in the region. Wade identifies twenty-one Native groups, including the Jumano, who inhabited the Edwards Plateau at that time. She offers evidence that the groups had sophisticated social and cultural mechanisms, including extensive information networks, ladino cultural brokers, broad-based coalitions, and individuals with dual-ethnic status. She also tracks the eastern movement of Spanish colonizers into the Edwards Plateau region, explores the relationships among Native groups and between those groups and European colonizers, and develops a timeline that places isolated events and singular individuals within broad historical processes.Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers
By James Howe. 1970
The Kuna of Panama, today one of the best known indigenous peoples of Latin America, moved over the course of…
the twentieth century from orality and isolation towards literacy and an active engagement with the nation and the world. Recognizing the fascination their culture has held for many outsiders, Kuna intellectuals and villagers have collaborated actively with foreign anthropologists to counter anti-Indian prejudice with positive accounts of their people, thus becoming the agents as well as subjects of ethnography. One team of chiefs and secretaries, in particular, independently produced a series of historical and cultural texts, later published in Sweden, that today still constitute the foundation of Kuna ethnography. As a study of the political uses of literacy, of western representation and indigenous counter-representation, and of the ambivalent inter-cultural dialogue at the heart of ethnography, Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers addresses key issues in contemporary anthropology. It is the story of an extended ethnographic encounter, one involving hundreds of active participants on both sides and continuing today.The Teotihuacan Trinity
By Annabeth Headrick. 2007
Northeast of modern-day Mexico City stand the remnants of one of the world’s largest preindustrial cities, Teotihuacan. Monumental in scale,…
Teotihuacan is organized along a three-mile-long thoroughfare, the Avenue of the Dead, that leads up to the massive Pyramid of the Moon. Lining the avenue are numerous plazas and temples, which indicate that the city once housed a large population that engaged in complex rituals and ceremonies. Although scholars have studied Teotihuacan for over a century, the precise nature of its religious and political life has remained unclear, in part because no one has yet deciphered the glyphs that may explain much about the city’s organization and belief systems. In this groundbreaking book, Annabeth Headrick analyzes Teotihuacan’s art and architecture, in the light of archaeological data and Mesoamerican ethnography, to propose a new model for the city’s social and political organization. Challenging the view that Teotihuacan was a peaceful city in which disparate groups united in an ideology of solidarity, Headrick instead identifies three social groups that competed for political power—rulers, kin-based groups led by influential lineage heads, and military orders that each had their own animal insignia. Her findings provide the most complete evidence to date that Teotihuacan had powerful rulers who allied with the military to maintain their authority in the face of challenges by the lineage heads. Headrick’s analysis also underscores the importance of warfare in Teotihuacan society and clarifies significant aspects of its ritual life, including shamanism and an annual tree-raising ceremony that commemorated the Mesoamerican creation story.The Indians of Quetico
By Emerson Coatsworth, Robert Dailey. 1957
A fascinating picture of the industrious life of the Ojibwa before the coming of the white man. The Indians lived…
in an intimate relationship with the forest and the spiritual forces they found in nature. They were completely dependent on wild game, trees, and plants for their food, their clothing, and their dwellings, and they realized that it was in their best interest to protect these things, to ensure their livelihood year after year and for the generations to come.The author traces the outlines of this Indian civilization—the Ojibwa's social organization, family life, the quest for food, their handicrafts, and the world of the supernatural with which they lived in such intimacy. The result is an authoritative and entertaining account. The book contains 8 photographs, 25 line drawings and two-colour end-paper map.Life Among the Apaches
By John C. Cremony. 2015
One of the original seventeenth-century historical accounts of the Apaches and the southwestern American Indians.John C. Cremony's first encounter with…
the Indians of the Southwest occurred in the early 1850s, when he accompanied John R. Bartlett's boundary commission surveying the United States-Mexican border. Some ten years later, as an officer of the California Volunteers, he renewed his acquaintance, particularly with the Apaches, whom he came to know as few white Americans before him had. Cremony was the first white man to become fluent in the Apache language, and he published the first dictionary of their language as a tool for the US Army.Cremony's account of his experiences, published in 1868, quickly became, and remains today, an indispensable source on Apache beliefs, tribal life, and fighting tactics. Although its original purpose was to induce more effective military suppression of the Apaches, it has all the fast-paced action and excitement of a novel and the authenticity of an ethnographic and historical document. Life Among the Apaches is unrivaled in its attention to detail, and Cremony's firsthand accounts of the intricacies of daily life for the Apaches make it both an essential text on Native American culture and a truly important anthropological work.People of the Volcano: Andean Counterpoint in the Colca Valley of Peru
By Noble David Cook, Alexandra Parma Cook. 2007
While it now attracts many tourists, the Colca Valley of Peru's southern Andes was largely isolated from the outside world…
until the 1970s, when a passable road was built linking the valley--and its colonial churches, terraced hillsides, and deep canyon--to the city of Arequipa and its airport, eight hours away. Noble David Cook and his co-researcher Alexandra Parma Cook have been studying the Colca Valley since 1974, and this detailed ethnohistory reflects their decades-long engagement with the valley, its history, and its people. Drawing on unusually rich surviving documentary evidence, they explore the cultural transformations experienced by the first three generations of Indians and Europeans in the region following the Spanish conquest of the Incas. Social structures, the domestic export and economies, and spiritual spheres within native Andean communities are key elements of analysis. Also highlighted is the persistence of duality in the Andean world: perceived dichotomies such as those between the coast and the highlands, Europeans and Indo-Peruvians. Even before the conquest, the Cabana and Collagua communities sharing the Colca Valley were divided according to kinship and location. The Incas, and then the Spanish, capitalized on these divisions, incorporating them into their state structure in order to administer the area more effectively, but Colca Valley peoples resisted total assimilation into either. Colca Valley communities have shown a remarkable tenacity in retaining their social, economic, and cultural practices while accommodating various assimilationist efforts over the centuries. Today's population maintains similarities with their ancestors of more than five hundred years ago--in language, agricultural practices, daily rituals, familial relationships, and practices of reciprocity. They also retain links to ecological phenomena, including the volcanoes from which they believe they emerged and continue to venerate.Tomahawk and Musket - French and Indian Raids in the Ohio Valley 1758
By Peter Dennis, Rene Chartrand. 2012
In 1758, at the height of the French and Indian War, British Brigadier General John Forbes led his army on…
a methodical advance against Fort Duquesene, French headquarters in the Ohio valley. As his army closed in upon the fort, he sent Major Grant of the 77th Highlanders and 850 men on a reconnaissance in force against the fort. The French, alerted to this move, launched their own counter-raid. 500 French and Canadians, backed by 500 Indian allies, ambushed the highlanders and sent them fleeing back to the main army. With the success of that operation, the French planned their own raid against the English encampment at Fort Ligonier less than fifty miles away. With only 600 men, against an enemy strength of 4,000, the French & Amerindians launched a daring night attack on the heart of the enemy encampment. This book tells the complete story of these ambitious raids and counter-raids, giving in-depth detail on the forces, terrain, and tactics.The Pueblo Revolt
By David Roberts. 2008
With the conquest of New Mexico in 1598, Spanish governors, soldiers, and missionaries began their brutal subjugation of the Pueblo…
Indians in what is today the Southwestern United States. This oppression continued for decades, until, in the summer of 1680, led by a visionary shaman named Pope, the Puebloans revolted. Before then the many different Pueblo villages had never acted in concert (and never would again). Now, in total secrecy they coordinated an attack, killing 401 settlers and soldiers and routing the rulers in Santa Fe. Every Spaniard was driven from the Pueblo homeland, the only time in North American history that conquering Europeans were thoroughly expelled from Indian territory. Yet today, more than three centuries later, crucial questions about the Pueblo Revolt remain unanswered. How did Pope succeed in his brilliant plot? And what happened in the Pueblo world between 1680 and 1692, when a new Spanish force reconquered the Pueblo peoples with relative ease? David Roberts set out to try to answer these questions and to bring this remarkable historical episode to life. He visited Pueblo villages, talked with Native American and Anglo historians, combed through archives, discovered backcountry ruins, sought out the vivid rock art panels carved and painted by Puebloans contemporary with the events, and pondered the existence of centuries-old Spanish documents never seen by Anglos.Defying the Odds: The Tule River Tribe's Struggle for Sovereignty in Three Centuries
By Gelya Frank, Carole Goldberg. 2010
An anthropologist and a legal scholar combine expertise in this innovative book, deploying the history of one California tribe--the Tule…
River Tribe--in a definitive study of indigenous sovereignty from earliest contact through the current Indian gaming era.The extraordinary life of Lewis & Clark’s right-hand man In 1804, John Colter set out with Meriwether Lewis and William…
Clark on the first U.S. expedition to traverse the North American continent. During the twenty-eight month ordeal, Colter served as a hunter and scout, and honed his survival skills on the western frontier. But when the journey was over, Colter stayed behind, spending two more years trekking alone through dangerous and unfamiliar territory. Along the way, he charted some of the West’s most treasured landmarks. Historian David W. Marshall crafts this captivating history from Colter’s primary sources, and has retraced Colter’s steps—seeing what he saw, hearing what he heard, and experiencing firsthand how he and his contemporaries survived in the wilderness (how they pitched a shelter, built a fire, followed a trail, and forded a stream)—adding a powerful layer of authority and detail. The American Grit series brings you true tales of endurance, survival, and ingenuity from the annals of American history. These books focus on the trials of remarkable individuals with an emphasis on rich primary source material and artwork.Native American Adoption, Captivity, and Slavery in Changing Contexts
By Max Carocci, Stephanie Pratt. 2012
Radically rethinks the theoretical parameters through which we interpret both current and past ideas of captivity, adoption, and slavery among…
Native American societies in an interdisciplinary perspective. Highlights the importance of the interaction between perceptions, representations and lived experience associated with the facts of slavery.An Introduction to Native North America -- Pearson eText
By Mark Q. Sutton. 2012
An Introduction to Native North America provides a basic introduction to the native peoples of North America including both…
the United States and Canada It covers the history of research basic prehistory the European invasion and the impact of Europeans on Native cultures Additionally much of the book is written from the perspective of the ethnographic present and the various cultures are described as they were at the specific times noted in the text Teaching and Learning Experiences Improve Critical Thinking - An Introduction to Native North America provides internet resources for students to supplement reading material and contains an extensive bibliography to aid in their research Engage Students - An Introduction to Native North America highlights important individuals in VIP Profile mini-biographies and contains Sidelights throughout the text which provides short explanations of interesting aspects of native culture Support Instructors - Teaching your course just got easier You can create a Customized Text or use our Instructor s Manual Electronic MyTest Test Bank or PowerPoint Presentation Slides Plus An Introduction to Native North America s organization was designed to be used in conjunction with the Handbook of North American Indians published by the Smithsonian InstitutionChicago's 50 Years of Powwows (Images of America)
By American Indian Center of Chicago. 2004
Since 1953, the American Indian Center of Chicago has hosted an annual powwow. The powwow is the centerpiece of contemporary…
Indian culture. It is how Native Americans celebrate traditional values and share their culture with a wider audience. The powwow is a place to make and rekindle friendships. It offers an opportunity to reaffirm traditional values and a chance to reconnect with family, friends, and the greater community. It is a celebration of artistic and cultural traditions, and a way of transmitting those traditions to a younger generation. Through an extensive collection of representative images, Chicago's 50 Years of Powwows chronicles the exciting history and traditions of the powwow.Florida's Seminole Wars: 1817-1858 (Making of America)
By Joe Knetsch. 2003
Among the most well known of Florida's native peoples, the Seminole Indians frustrated troops of militia and volunteer soldiers for…
decades during the first half of the nineteenth century in the ongoing struggle to keep hold of their ancestral lands. While careers and reputations of American military and political leaders were made and destroyed in the mosquito-infested swamps of Florida's interior, the Seminoles and their allies, including the Miccosukee tribe and many escaped slaves, managed to wage war on their own terms. The study of guerrilla warfare tactics employed by the Seminoles may have aided modern American forces fighting in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and other regions. Years before the first shots of the Civil War were fired, Florida witnessed a clash of wills and ways that prompted three wars unlike any others in America's history, although many of the same policies and mistakes were made in the Indian wars west of the Mississippi.Carolina in Crisis
By Daniel J. Tortora. 2015
In this engaging history, Daniel J. Tortora explores how the Anglo-Cherokee War reshaped the political and cultural landscape of the…
colonial South. Tortora chronicles the series of clashes that erupted from 1758 to 1761 between Cherokees, settlers, and British troops. The conflict, no insignificant sideshow to the French and Indian War, eventually led to the regeneration of a British-Cherokee alliance. Tortora reveals how the war destabilized the South Carolina colony and threatened the white coastal elite, arguing that the political and military success of the Cherokees led colonists to a greater fear of slave resistance and revolt and ultimately nurtured South Carolinians' rising interest in the movement for independence.Drawing on newspaper accounts, military and diplomatic correspondence, and the speeches of Cherokee people, among other sources, this work reexamines the experiences of Cherokees, whites, and African Americans in the mid-eighteenth century. Centering his analysis on Native American history, Tortora reconsiders the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the South while also detailing the Anglo-Cherokee War from the Cherokee perspective.